On mercantile accounting in pre-industrial Iran

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T. Khodadoust
UNIVERSITY OF TEHRAN
Paul Frishkoff UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
ON MERCANTILE ACCOUNTING IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL IRAN
Abstract: Iranian village accounting, which we studied by translating and analyzing the records of a trading house in the early twentieth century, was relatively un-affected by Western contact. The records were kept on a slightly modified cash basis, single-entry, with little distinction between business and personal transac-tions; this mirrors accounting practices in many "developing" societies. What was indeed unique was a distinctive set of numerical symbols, comprehensible to but a few initiates in each community, and whose primary goal was secrecy and privacy of the records. The system was used well before 1900 and is still in use in some rural areas today.
Although the study of the history of accounting has recently achieved a new height in popularity, research into non-Western accounting history has been slight. To be sure, acknowledgment is given to the Mesopotamians and other contributors to the "ancient" development of accounting, as well as to the Arabs for their numeri-cal system. But later developments, particularly in that very "cradle of civilization" tend to be ignored. One can only speculate on the reasons: Few Western researchers are conversants with the lan-guages used in the "third world." The preservation of accounting records through libraries and other means has been haphazard. Perhaps, too, there simply hasn't been that much interest in this sub-ject, or at least it has been easier to channel research energy into more "obvious" developments in the corporate, industrial, Western world.
In this article, we examine a system of bookkeeping which evolved among the merchants of Iran (Persia) and which is still in use in some of the more remote villages. Its unique features merely drama-tize what many of us already accept: that accounting systems arise to meet the needs of the particular situation.
The trading houses of Iran were primarily family-owned or at least very closely held enterprises. There was little distinction between